Pro Cycling Interview

Samuel Abt

The veteran journalist speaks exclusively with Bicycling about covering 31 Tours de France, the changes he’s seen in the sport, and bicycle racing’s rich narrative lines.

james startt

(Photo by Samuel Abt in Paris, February 2012. (James Startt))

PARIS (Bicycling.com) — Samuel Abt is cycling journalism’s senior statesman in the English language. The first American to write about the Tour de France regularly, Abt covered 31 Tours, from 1977 to 2007. His stories in The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune, and his many books, inspired countless cyclists, cycling fans, and other journalists.

Today Abt is retired and lives in a suburb of Paris. He sat down with Bicycling's James Startt in February 2012 to discuss his long career and the many changes he has seen in the sport.

Bicycling: Is it true that for most of the 31 years you covered the Tour de France it was sort of a summer vacation from your "real job" as an editor at the International Herald Tribune?

Samuel Abt: Yes, for most years it was. For the first 10 years I was assigned to cover the Tour while working at the Herald Tribune, so it didn’t come out of my own time. But then we got an editor who said, “If you want to do it, you’ve got to do it on your own time, but we’ll pay you for the stories.” So that’s when it became a sort of summer vacation for me, and it stayed that way up until the end.

Bicycling: Your job at the Tribune was putting together page one of the paper.

Abt: That was one of my jobs. When I started I was sports editor for about three years. Then I was features editor, then deputy editor, where, yes, I’d often put together page one. But I only got into sports as a sort of sanctuary, to get away from a bad political situation in the newsroom for a while.

Bicycling: Was the Tour in some ways a sanctuary too?

Abt: I don’t know if it was a sanctuary, but I liked doing it. I liked the Tour. It was something to do and there were almost no Americans doing it. You never saw another American journalist until Greg LeMond came along. But it wasn’t a sanctuary; it was a job. I covered the Tour and other races. I also worked for The New York Times, but they were never interested in Paris-Roubaix or the Worlds, but the Herald Tribune was.

But you have to remember that back in the 1970s, the Tour de France was nothing in the United States. It just didn’t mean much. There were no American riders; there were no Anglophone riders. I’ll never forget when someone at The Times said, “We don’t have many Belgians in our readership, so please never write another story about a rider whose name ends in ‘ckx.’” And I said, “Well shit! That’s Eddy Merckx, the greatest rider in the world!” And they said, “Well, it’s just of no interest to us.” So I wrote about Eddy Merckx anyway, and they came to their senses.

Greg LeMond changed it for Americans, obviously. Then Sports Illustrated decided that they had to pay some attention to the Tour, so they would send over some guys who just regarded it as a three-week vacation. They didn’t even file every week, but would just do one wrap-up at the end of the race. I remember one guy who came over with his teenage son and immediately went down to Spain and spent three weeks on the beach and then came back. These were days when people wrote on paper, and when he came back he bought somebody’s carbons so that he knew what had gone on!

And sometimes CBS would cover the race, but they were pathetic. They covered it in a totally half-ass way. They would cover it maybe twice a week, but they had no idea what was going on. I even remember one year when the Tour DuPont finished in Washington, D.C., and the Washington Post didn’t even cover it. The editor basically didn’t consider bicycle racing a sport.

So back then the Tour was an entirely different kind of race. But every year at the end of the Tour, The Times would send me about 10 letters from readers saying how much they appreciated my stories because they couldn’t find coverage anywhere else. And this meant a lot to The Times, which liked international coverage.

Bicycling: By getting your stories about the Tour de France in The New York Times, you were a pioneer, the first to bring bicycle racing to the mainstream media in the U.S.

Abt: Well, they were neither enthusiastic nor unenthusiastic about it; they were indifferent. But over the years I had a lot of very understanding, very supportive editors. Until the end, that is, when we got some dumbo who was only interested in scandal. I won’t use a name, but he was really unsupportive and stupid.

And this was during the Armstrong years. The Times became unhappy with me because I still insisted on covering the race rather than snooping around for scandal. At one point a whole lot of reporters showed up who were basically crime reporters. And my last few years doing it were pretty unhappy because I was getting all this pressure to dig up Lance Armstrong doping stories.

Bicycling: Well, there were a lot of doping scandals then.

Abt: Yeah, of course there were, and I covered the Festina Affair, for example. But I wasn’t going to go snooping around under beds. I wasn’t going to interview people looking for dirt, which at that time is what The New York Times wanted.